While hundreds of universities and colleges have active campus divestment campaigns, generally led by students, Stanford has faced significant pressure from renowned faculty members.
Photograph: Alamy

Stanford University’s board of trustees has voted not to divest from fossil fuels in a move that has drawn widespread criticisms from students and environmental groups as other colleges across the US have pledged to end oil and gas investments in response to campus protests.

The decision at Stanford, a prestigious university that has advertised itself as a “leader in combating climate change”, comes after years of protests at the northern California campus, including a high-profile sit-in last year during which students demanded that the school “completely divest” its $22.2bn endowment from the fossil fuel industry.

“We believe the long-term solution is for all of us to reduce our consumption of fossil fuel resources and develop effective alternatives,” the board of trustees said in a statement. “Because achieving these goals will take time, and given how integral oil and gas are to the global economy, the trustees do not believe that a credible case can be made for divesting from the fossil fuel industry until there are competitive and readily available alternatives.”

The board was responding to the demands of Fossil Free Stanford, a group that has pushed for full divestment and has organized hundreds of students to pledge to withhold donations until the university commits to divestment.

Over the last year, many US colleges have announced plans to partially or fully divest in fossil fuels and instead in invest in clean energy technologies.

In April 2015, Syracuse University, with a $1.18bn endowment, became the largest university in the world to commit to remove its endowment from direct investments in coal, oil and gas companies. The New School, the University of Glasgow and the University of Dayton have all pledged full fossil fuel divestment.

Ten UK universities also moved forward with fossil fuel divestments last year in advance of the UN climate change talks in Paris.

Many universities have agreed to end investments in coal mining companies, including Stanford in 2014. But months after Stanford took that step, which made it the most prominent university to cut ties to coal, the school invested in three oil and gas companies.

While hundreds of universities and colleges have active campus divestment campaigns, generally led by students, Stanford has faced significant pressure from renowned faculty members, who wrote a letter in January 2015, demanding that Stanford pull out of all fossil fuel investments.

“The urgency and magnitude of climate change call not for partial solutions, however admirable; they demand the more profound and thorough commitment embodied in divestment from all fossil-fuel companies,” faculty wrote in the letter, which was signed by the first female winner of the prestigious Fields prize in mathematics, Maryam Mizarkhani, the Nobel laureates Douglas Osheroff and Roger Kornberg and hundreds of other professors.

“It’s very flabbergasting to me,” Mark Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering, said Thursday, “that they would consider keeping these investments when this industry is not only known to have caused mass mortality, it’s also caused devastating climate impacts. The industry has also obfuscated and smeared and hidden and tried to cover up the science of climate change.”

Jacobson, who signed the January letter, has researched the links between carbon dioxide emissions and human mortality, finding that for each 1 degree Celsius increase caused by carbon dioxide, the resulting air pollution would lead annually to roughly a thousand additional deaths and many more cases of asthma and respiratory illness in the US.

“I work day in and day out studying air pollution,” he said. “They didn’t even consult me on this issue.”

Stanford’s coal divestment opened the door for other universities to follow suit, and if it chose to fully divest from fossil fuels, the ripple effect could have been significant, said Josh Lappen, a junior and student organizer with Fossil Free Stanford.

“When Stanford chooses to be a moral and intellectual leader and put its policies in line with the research of its own faculty, it makes a tremendous difference, not just symbolically but practically.”

Lappen said the group’s campaign, which began four years ago, will move forward, and students will continue to connect the board of trustees with the university’s climate change experts. “We feel betrayed … but we are only getting larger and stronger, and we will not waiver in our determination.”